The Complete Works of John Milton

Barbara Kiefer Lewalski is William R. Kenan Jr. Research Professor of History and Literature and of English at Harvard University. She held professorial chairs and taught at Harvard and at Brown University for many years, and served as Director of Graduare Studies in English at both institutions. Her several books and articles are chiefly in the area of Renaissance English literature, especially Milton. Her Life of John Milton: a Critical Biography (2000) won the James Holly Hanford prize of the Milton Society of America; her Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (l979) was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize for best book, by the Modern Landuage Association. She has held visiting appointments at several universities, including in China (the Beijing Foreign Studies University) and has lectured widely in America, England, and elsewhere.Estelle Haan is Professor of English and Neo-Latin Studies at The Queen's University of Belfast. She is the author/editor of twelve books spanning her research interests in neo-Latin literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These include From Academia to Amicitia: Milton's Latin Writings and the Italian Academies (1998), Thomas Gray's Latin Poetry: Some Classical, Neo-Latin and Vernacular Contexts (2000), Andrew Marvell's Latin Poetry: From Text to Context (2003), Classical Romantic: Identity in the Latin Poetry of Vincent Bourne (2007), Both English and Latin: Bilingualism and Biculturalism in Milton's Neo-Latin Writings (2012). In addition to authoring a stream of articles on Milton, she contributed two essays to The Oxford Handbook of Milton (2009). She is currently editing Milton's Epistolarum Familiarium Liber Unus , and uncollected letters for The Oxford Complete Works of John Milton , Volume 11.

The edition of Milton's Shorter Poems has so many solid virtues ... The poems are presented elegantly on the page, with short but clear notes at the back ... It includes at the back a cornucopia of transcriptions from the Trinity Manuscript and of early versions of Comus. These are available elsewhere, but are difficult to gather in a single place, and they give generous space within the volume to Milton the tentative reviser.

• List of Illustrations ; Abbreviations ; Editorial Procedures ; Introductions ; The 1645 Poems ; Poems added in 1673 ; Poems omitted in 1645 and 1673, published and manuscript versions ; Trinity Manuscript of A Mask, transcription ; Bridgewater Manuscript of A Mask, transcription ; Commentaries ; Appendix A: Poems published in other places and manuscript versions ; Appendix B: Trinity Manuscript versions not elsewhere transcribed ; Appendix C: Other manuscript versions ; Appendix D: Other Hobson Poems ; Appendix E: Henry Lawes' Music for the Songs in A Mask, with commentary